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There are far too many areas within web development in need of innovation today. However, as I see it the biggest areas for innovation in this space are:

Big Data – Everyone is talking about big data and how important and impactful it is on business today. However, I’m not reading much about it when it comes to the web. Let’s face it, businesses who are worth their salt have information and some form of branding and/or marketing on the web. That’s a pretty simplistic achievement by today’s standards. The next big leap for business is to move their practices, information access, and even their management to the web. That will mean the need for broader, device independent access, support for heterogeneous data sources both big and small, embracing the mobile user base regardless of deployment preference: on-premise or cloud, and a lot more use of machine learning and predictive analytics geared toward real-time decision making. All of this encompasses our use of what’s called Big Data today. However, the innovations surrounding the use of it today are small and will pale in comparison to what the future holds.

Web Intelligence – As our knowledge of design and user experience expands, we begin to expand our belief system; re-examining what is and isn’t possible in the world wide web. We already employ intelligent algorithms used for machine learning and predictive analytics.

However, I envision a world where those same algorithms, spread across thousands of source systems, will join into a global intelligence network providing behavior pattern recognition, experience insights, and even pattern-based categorization.

Yes, the web is about to become a whole lot more intelligent and Komaya will be right there helping to shape it, mold it, and to help our clients benefit greatly from it.

Performance – I believe that over the next 3-5 years we will see vast improvements over the current forms of image and video compression of today. Development tools will be smarter and automatically analyze images to find the sweet spot, such that the quality is high enough and the file size is as small as possible. More than that though, web servers of the future will work harder and smarter and will have built-in features that make experience and performance decisions on-the-fly. Those server-side algorithms will process each element of a page transmission and evaluate things like:

What is the client type?

What is the overall page size being requested?

Do images need existing transparency?

Do images need their animated elements?

Do images contain non-visible data?

and will be able to act accordingly to ensure the down-stream clients, regardless of type get the best possible speed and visual experience. Rest assured that every innovation we see between now and even 5 years from now will itself lead to even more opportunities. It’s an exciting time to be in the web space.

How will sites of the future effect revenue?

The short answer is they already do in some very big ways. As new web standards emerge, we see a continual need from our clients to include more and more visual elements. These changes are exciting and new and draw more and more traffic to their sites, which is good! More traffic can equate to more revenue. However, more imagery equates to bigger page sizes which can become big performance problems very quickly. Page performance effects revenue, plain and simple. Small sites, like AutoAnything, cut their load time in half, and saw revenue grow by 13 percent. Large sites, like Amazon have shown that for every 100 milliseconds of performance slowdown, they experience a 1 percent drop in revenue. This is especially true for mobile users. Large pages mean long load times and poor perceived performance. While that does mean big money for the mobile carriers who are all too eager to cash in on the data plans, it also means a lot of frustration for downstream mobile users which equates to less money for those sites as traffic is driven away by poor performance. Sites of the future will have all of the essential elements in-check, striking a good balance between stellar visual experience and high performance.

How will Komaya’s products and solutions be different five years from today?

Current trends are pointing toward a world in which the web plays larger, more relevant and even strategic roles in everyday business. It’s no secret that web implementations are as varied as the sands in the Sahara. Today’s businesses are already seeing the need to expand their web presence to include social, marketing, and other such information. It’s not a big stretch to say that super visual, interactive, and data oriented sites will emerge as the new normal in the next couple of years. Those exciting new sites will have elements that mix state-of-the-art visualization with data that spans a variety of source systems, and languages, each tailored to the user’s expectations and experience. Yes, it’s apparent that the need for smarter, real-time, on-the-fly operations, data presentations, and visualizations becomes the new norm, even for smaller businesses in which staying alive and continuing to be competitive becomes paramount.
Komaya is gearing up to meet these challenges head-on. In fact over the next three to five years we’ll have sites that employ a wide variety of visualization and data technologies with incredible performance! We’ve got algorithms that interpret or infer what a users’ needs are and make requests to cache necessary data preemptively. I think that’s enough of a peak behind the curtain for now though.

What is the most exciting part of your job?

There are many exciting elements in what I consider my job. Not the least of which are the many opportunities I have to interact with our prospects and clients. I really do enjoy helping them realize their dreams and see their successes! A close second is the opportunity to interact and rub shoulders with some of the smartest developers in the world. There are so many opportunities in front of us. From technologies to explore and employ, to stale areas of web design ripe for innovation, there are far too many variables for things not to be constantly exciting and new around here. Our very existence depends on our ability to make our clients’ visions a reality. That means that things that seem impossible today, are the very things we’re toying with. The goal for all of us at Komaya is to make today’s impossibilities tomorrow’s possibilities and even realities. I believe that we will be a key player in revolutionizing the way we think about web solutions, their varied implementations, and much more. You see, it doesn’t really matter what’s impossible today. To quote Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”